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Ray Mears: up close with a species under threat
Boudicca Fox-Leonard goes on a trek with the famous naturalist who says it’s a hard time for men like him in TV
Ray Mears is propped up against the trunk of a tree, drinking a billycan of instant coffee. We’re taking a pause in our slow trek in Ashdown Forest, a wood close to Mears’s home and his heart. He knows it intimately. Although as a result of lockdown there are more boot tracks than usual, not just here, but everywhere in Britain, he laughs.
“I find footprints in places there should not be footprints, but that’s nice in a way,” he adds gently.
Not a coffee drinker, I’m warming my hands on a tea made from birch polypore, a bracket fungus Mears poked off the top of a birch tree using a dead branch earlier, shortly after he’d tapped a neighbouring birch for its sap and I glugged it down like an elixir.
Later we’ll stalk a deer, a young roebuck bobbing away from us, and find badger setts that are fresh, as well as those that are not currently in use but have existed for hundreds of years.
Right now though, we sit, cradling our cans and drinking in the atmosphere of the forest. All appears to be still, yet the sap is rising. Spring; it’s an exciting time of year, Mears tells me.
In the next month, it will go mad. “The birds are already nesting. This is a time of procreation of the little things and the predators will have their offspring a little later to take advantage of the naive young. It’s a very exciting time, especially in woodland. Light comes into the forest floor, and every day the sun gets higher, the floor gets warmer. In a month’s time there will be bluebells everywhere. Then the canopy closes and you go into a new mood and season.”
Coming out of his reverie, Mears adds: “When you see Springwatch on TV, they’re always too late. Spring has already sprung. I don’t watch them. They’re too produced.”
I ask him what he makes of Chris Packham. “He’s a good naturalist. I suspect he’s given up.
“I think it’s a hard time for the likes of us white middle-aged males in television,” Mears adds. “I don’t worry about it. I just do what I do. Stick to your guns and be good at what you do.”
Just as Mears can identify all the species in the forest and their qualities, his perception of himself is astute. Soon after we first met in the car park, Mears quickly said he could be pretty un-PC. While I don’t hear anything warranting immediate cancellation during our three-hour long talk and silent walk, it’s clear he’s a man determined not to be cowed into thinking a certain way. He has opinions. Those who refuse to wear masks are “selfish”. Money was wasted on debating foxhunting “while our common British bird species hit the red list”. There is a role to be played by big game hunting in financially supporting African endangered species. TV presenter Ant Middleton, who was dropped over his tweets? “I think a bit of non-PC is no bad thing.” A lot of wildlife television is “very poor”, with the exception of the blue-chip Blue Planet-style shows. While there are plenty of “Voice of God” shows, he feels there’s no balance at the other end, with programmes that have the common touch of Gerald Durrell’s seminal series, The Amateur Naturalist: “A superb series that encouraged people to get out into nature and explore for themselves.”
Mears is a man who sees the world in grey rather than black and white. A man who knows a lot about his subject, is proud of his past work with indigenous communities and perhaps senses that
‘Forest bathing and wild swimming? It’s just swimming and it’s walking in the woods’
his face no longer fits. For the past 10 years, he’s made low-budget wildlife documentaries for ITV, making the most of his fieldcraft skills to capture footage others would struggle to find in a similar time period.
His latest TV series, Wild China, airs in June. While filming, his team had a day and a half to capture footage of an elusive snow leopard. They did it.
The producers may have cause to be nervous. Mears fiercely condemns Chinese wet markets as an “odious practice”. He also says China is doing great things in the area of wildlife conservation, however. They’ve banned hunting and are opening their first national park. From talking to Chinese naturalists, he learnt that Attenborough’s shows, which he once criticised for being too glossy, have had a real impact, and in fact inspired a whole new generation of conservationists.
The snow leopard story is also in his new book, We Are Nature, which is both a guide to fieldcraft and memoir of his notable wildlife experiences. Written because he wants us all to get back to our instinctive response to nature, it conveys his passion for British wildlife as well as the megafauna he has had the privilege to track in Africa.
He asks me if I’ve read the book. I have. I enjoyed it, more for the colourful recollections of his tracking wildlife than the details about the right binocular to buy. Mears tells me that another national newspaper journalist had clearly only read his Wikipedia page. “Which is all wrong”.
A lot is made in interviews about Mears’s helicopter crash, the death of his first wife from cancer aged 50, Bear Grylls and his helping the police track the murderer Raoul Moat. He is weary. I sense he would rather talk about the knowledge he has accumulated over a lifetime of study, and his passion for sharing it.
He wrote the book in lockdown after his ordinary schedule was cancelled. The publishers wanted him to write about rewilding. He asked instead to write about rewilding us.
“If we do restore nature, then people need to know what to do with it.”
Chapters in the book are divided into the senses; smell, taste, touch. It’s easy to over-exercise our visual senses with a sugary fix of television or social media.
Mears urges me to touch the moss on the fallen trunk I’m sitting on: “It’s more stimulating than a keyboard will ever be.”
Some would call this “forest bathing”. Mears is disdainful: “We live in a crazy world where people talk about ‘forest bathing’ and ‘wild swimming’. I mean it’s swimming and it’s walking in a wood. What’s special about that? It’s normal. The fact people think that’s remarkable is worrying.”
His own taste for adventure hasn’t abated. Now aged 57, he prefers the more dangerous and demanding trips he organises to the Arctic and canoe trips in the Canadian wilderness.
Unlike conventional outdoor pursuits, which are led by the young, in his world it’s experience that counts. “You can’t replace that. It’s like training a dog team for sledding. The old dog teaches the young dogs.”
One lifetime isn’t enough, he says, to learn everything, but he’s at the point where there are few teachers he can turn to. His own curiosity and experimentation are what guides him now. He admits it can be lonely, but it’s all right. “I feel like I’m in touch with our ancestors.”
If what he has is wisdom, what does he think of the Youth Strike for Climate movement?
“I worry about Greta Thunberg. Little Miss Angry. I understand, but if you want to make a donkey move and you kick it up the backside, it eventually kicks you back. If you offer it greener grass, or even a carrot, it will go wherever you want.
“What we need to do is recognise the benefits of improving things and then everyone will be more willing to move in that direction. It can’t be just the spiritual benefits, like it or not, there’s got to be financial benefits.”
Mears describes himself as a pragmatist. As such, he says: “I admire Greta, but I worry she’s lost her childhood to this. Nature will repair itself. The planet couldn’t care less if we survive or not. The dinosaurs came and went.”
I wonder, does he like humans? Mears laughs. “I think, generally, I feel rather despondent about our species. I’m not a sheep. I’m a wolf, I’m a leopard, I’m a loner. I’ve travelled to places where it’s just me and nature and survived there by my wits and it taught me a lot about the world. And I watch our species en masse and I don’t really like what I see. That’s not to say we can’t change.”
He hopes we learn from the coronavirus. That we learn humility.
There are more things to see on our walk; a lesser spotted woodpecker, a recently vacated deer couch, a giant, dead beech tree that must have been 600 years old.
Mears thanks for me for coming to Sussex. Neither of us has spoken to someone new in person for quite a while. I tell him it’s been a privilege. I’ve learnt a lot.
I leave knowing I’ve had an experience many people pay a lot of money for. And I’ve had my own experience up close with a species under threat: the middle-aged male naturalist.
‘I watch our species and I don’t really like what I see. That’s not to say we can’t change’
We Are Nature is published by Ebury Press on Thursday (hardback, £20)